Bizarre billionaire side projects

From Elon Musk digging tunnels to Jeff Bezos's giant clock inside a mountain, billionaires are doing very interesting side projects with their spare billions.

Settle down everyone, it’s not real … yet.Source:Supplied

One day a huge Amazon blimp could float above our cities deploying drones to deliver packages to your doorstep, like an alien mothership sending out its worker minions to satisfy the whims of consumers.

But not today.

A video depicting exactly that has taken the internet for a ride this week, with many believing it was legitimate.

Amazon has been experimenting with drone delivery for some time, and while the video looks like the crazy future of retail, this rather dystopian image isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

One drone-loving page on Facebook posted the video with the tagline: “The future delivery is here.”

Meanwhile, plenty of Twitter users were suitably freaked out by the video, labelling it absolutely terrifying.

One tweet that labelled the site “borderline dystopian” was shared 17,000 times and liked by more than 52,000 users. It happened to be shared on April Fool’s Day, which was befitting because it’s not exactly real.

It’s a computer-generated clip created by a digital artist in Japan who was inspired by the Lockheed Martin P-791, an experimental hybrid airship. The artist shared some of their renderings of the clip on Twitter.

But the reason it’s so easy to believe is because it brings to life a very real patent that Amazon was awarded after it filed it back in 2014. The patent represents an idea by the e-commerce giant for flying blimps that would essentially act as floating warehouses equipped with fleets of drones that deliver goods to busy locations, the BBC reported in 2016.

Amazon said one potential use could be to fly one near sporting events or festivals where they would sell food or souvenirs to spectators.

Amazon has considered a future of airborne delivery networks.Source:Supplied

Companies file thousands of crazy patents that never come to fruition in the real world, and this may very well end up falling into that category. But you never know.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos once predicted retail delivery drones would be commonplace by 2018. It turns out he was a little premature in his forecast, and drone delivery needs to become commonplace before we start thinking about flying warehouses.